I love this game but...

[frank]

This game is amazing, Chapter 2 is amazing, just finished it BUT it runs like ass. I barely break 60 fps but it doesn't bother me coz this game surprisingly has satisfying stealth, not amazing but its good enough. The biggest mistake (I think) in developing this game is using Unity Engine, that alone is the reason why it has terrible performance like Escape from Tarkov, even Caves of Qud shows the issues of the engine and that game doesn't even do much, should've used UE4 engine like Amid Evil.

What makes me keep coming back is the progression and finding secrets. If the mountain level ever comes out, I hope it would run decently that running and gunning would be more satisfying.

[Night_Rage]

The game doesnt run like Ass tho. Even without VSync, it'll still cap roughly at 60. Every now n then it'll go higher, but i believe its a imposed Cap. Not meant to go higher, and runs buttery smooth constantly on 60 anyway.
If you're not getting constant 60, its a PC problem, not the game. Both me and a friend have been playing, and had zero issues, and we dont even have high end rigs.

[リアンダ]

Originally posted by frank:

The biggest mistake (I think) in developing this game is using Unity Engine, that alone is the reason why it has terrible performance like Escape from Tarkov, even Caves of Qud shows the issues of the engine and that game doesn't even do much, should've used UE4 engine like Amid Evil.
.

This is not how engines work. Unity is worse in some aspects than unreal and vice versa but ultimately it's a tool like say maya and blender which can both do the same things each with their own drawbacks and advantages. There's plenty of unity games with great performance and tons of games made in unreal that perform terribly. Stop throwing unity under the bus unless you have extensive experience working in said engine or at least be more precise as to why you think unity messes with performance. I'm fairly familiar with that engine so don't hesitate to get technical.


Anyway, my personal guess as to why the game runs badly is a combinationof three things.

1.) While the textures may look lowres they aren't. Back in the old days a pixelated look resulted from low resolutions. In the case of blood west it's an artistic choice done by "pixelizing" handpainted textures while the overall textue resolution remains relatively high. As a result the textures are still relatively taxing to the system even though they may not look like it.

2.) I think that the devs were somewhat careless when creating game assets as far as LoDs are concerned. Basically the devs decided that the poly budget of Blood Wests game assets is so low by default that they don't need to bother as much with highly optimized LoDs as you usually would. And while this assumption may be true in most scenes sometimes the shere amount of lowpoly assets in areas like "the town/golden herring" adds up to a level where frames start to drop. Think of it like 7Days to die. If you put enough cubes into a scene (huntsville hospital/desert town) even the best PCs will start to struggle.

3.) The game has a much higher draw distance than most games back in the early 2000s would have which amplifies the problems mentioned in 1.) and 2.)

So yeah, I think putting the blame on unity is categorically wrong.

Originally posted by Night_Rage:

The game doesnt run like Ass tho. Even without VSync, it'll still cap roughly at 60. Every now n then it'll go higher, but i believe its a imposed Cap. Not meant to go higher, and runs buttery smooth constantly on 60 anyway.
If you're not getting constant 60, its a PC problem, not the game. Both me and a friend have been playing, and had zero issues, and we dont even have high end rigs.

There's a dedicated thread of people complaining about bad performance and there's a variety of systems in there. A game that looks like Blood West Should run on any modern PC without any issue. You shouldn't cap at 60fps without vsync but at 150+ frames if a game looks like this.